October 10, 2017

Ah, it's so fitting. The Salem Chamber of Commerce has chosen T.J. Sullivan to be its president-elect. Meaning, Sullivan is in the on-deck circle to come up and bat for this town's most notorious promoter of selfish right-wing business interests.

To "honor" T.J. Sullivan (note the ironic quotation marks) I spent some time this evening Googling my previous blog posts about him.

Here's what I found, in chronological order:

February 2016: "Salem Chamber of Commerce mass transit bill to aid Cherriots is dead." Sullivan led the Chamber's fight to defeat a payroll tax that would have brought weekend and evening bus service to Salem. He said that if the payroll tax was defeated, which it was, the Chamber would work hard to find another source of funding for Cherriots. Well, they didn't try very hard, probably because, as I said in this post:

Bluntly speaking, the Salem Chamber of Commerce is controlled by people who don't give a shit about decent bus service in Salem. They just want to appear to care about the needs of those who use Cherriots, by necessity or choice.

I have worked with both Carole Smith and Chuck Bennett and had the opportunity to watch them engage with citizens in Salem.

...there aren’t many worse choices for mayor than Carole Smith. If she were elected mayor, and people like her elected to the City Council, they would set our city back years with their inability to make decisions that are in the best interest of Salem.

According to Carole Smith, the first sentence almost certainly was a lie. She couldn't remember ever working with T.J. Sullivan. In an online comment on his letter, Smith said:

Say all the nice things you want about Bennett, but leave me out of it since I don't really know you TJ and I can tell by your comments that you really don't [know] me either. Stop the hate.

"Lie" is a word that's supposed to be reserved for Donald Trump'ian sorts of deliberate falsehoods. "Misspoke," "shaded the truth," "was inaccurate" -- these are oft-heard replacements for "lie."

But I don't what else to call what T.J. Sullivan, a representative of the Keep Salem Safe campaign that's advocating for Measure 24-399, the vastly over-priced $82 million police facility bond measure on the November ballot, did last night at a Morningside Neighborhood Association meeting.

...Here's another T.J. Sullivan falsehood about Measure 24-399, the $82 million police facility bond on Salem's November ballot. (Sullivan's previous falsehood is described here.)

At the September 23 Salem City Club debate on the police facility bond between Sullivan and me, he said this:

"So if we get $82 million for this new police facility, and we don't use the whole $82 million, we can, depending on how we write the bonding language, we can take that money and put it into retrofitting City Hall and the Library...That's the fastest way we're going to get City Hall and the Library retrofitted, by passing this bond."

Not true.

January 2017: "Disturbing facts revealed about $749,000 Park Front urban renewal grant" T.J. Sullivan, a former Salem city councilor, was able to get a $749,000 grant from the City of Salem for his Park Front building under highly dubious circumstances. I delved into the details of the urban renewal grant after getting documents through a public records request.

Here's highlights of what I learned:

Park Front developer T.J. Sullivan wrongly asserted in his grant application to the City of Salem that 80 permanent new jobs would be created by the project. This should be grounds for the City Council revoking, or at least revisiting, approval of the $749,000 urban renewal grant, since the actual number of permanent new jobs likely is zero, or very few.

It is clear that the Park Front building was going to be built with or without urban renewal funds, so the City of Salem's claim that public funds leveraged private investment with public money is false.

The Park Front developers said they plan to use the $749,000 to "add back" features of the building that they were going to leave out after construction costs escalated and Pioneer Trust Bank failed to loan them as much money as they asked for. So I continue to call this crony capitalism, since these are normal problems encountered by developers.

Approval of the grant by the City Council acting as the Urban Renewal Agency Board was rushed through by City staff before the end of 2016 so it wouldn't be considered by the 2017 City Council that would include three newly-elected progressive councilors.

So putting all this together, T.J. Sullivan is a mean-spirited guy prone to political lies who opposed a tax to improve Salem's bus service yet used his connections with City officials to get a bunch of undeserved money for his office building through crony capitalism.

In other words, he's a perfect match to lead the Salem Chamber of Commerce!

Comments

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Several years ago I got an email from Sullivan asking how to join CityWatch, an organization devoted to livability issues and the control of rampant and destructive types of development. I told him all he needed to do was send in a letter of application and a statement that he supported CityWatch's efforts and purposes. He then replied that he did support CityWatch's issues, which I already knew that he did not.

Honest questions: What concrete things have you done to make Salem better? How many people do you currently employ and how many have you employed over the past ten years? How much cumulative tax have you paid over the past ten years? Have you built anything?

I think it's great that people speak out on a blog and try to add value. However, if that is all that you do, you are just typing. You have no real world experience creating or building. If a small community in the middle of nowhere was just made of 50 people like you, it would whither and die in less than a generation.

By the way, Salem is not designed to support evening and weekend bus service. It is too scattered and too sprawled. The environmental cost would be too great. The actual cost would be incredible per person per ride. Running big polluting busses all over this sprawled city to maybe, possibly give one or two people a ride on Saturday morning or Tuesday evening would cost huge sums of money and a lot of useless pollution. A better approach would be to fight for more density and get people to not live on south commercial if their job is on north lancaster.

I’d love to see Brian put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with TJ Sullivan’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and blogging about your urinary tract problems and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours TJ Sullivan has given to this community.

This is how I ended the post, a.k.a. rant.
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Anyway, I've responded at length to Concerned Citizen and Ben because (1) it bugs me when someone asserts that I haven't created or built anything because I'm not a businessperson, and (2) it bugs me even more that this assertion oozes over into denigrating the contributions of everybody in Salem who has taken a non-business path in life.

Concerned Citizen said that if everybody was like me, a community would wither and die. Well, the same is true if everybody was like anybody.

Salem would die if there were only businesspeople in it. And not just figuratively, literally, since there would be no doctors and no nurses. And if there weren't teachers, librarians, artists, musicians, philosophers, writers, and so on, Salem wouldn't be a town worth living in.

So let's bury the Chamber of Commerce notion that Business Rules way more than ten feet under. How about ten miles under. I and countless others are valuable members of the Salem community not in spite of us not being in business, but because we're not.

I’d love to see commenter Ben put up his list of volunteer contributions towards making Salem a better place, so that could be compared with Brian Hines’s. But of course, that won’t happen, because sitting in your underwear behind a computer screen and posting comments on a blog about a urinary tract problem and geriatric skateboarding while generally complaining about those you disagree with really pales in comparison to the countless hours Brian Hines has given to this community.